Water Orrery
by water orrery
Summary: What happens when the only metahumans you ever hear about as a kid are either criminals or the superhero who takes them down?
Metahumans kill people. You see it on the news all the time. Violence and deaths.

Your city has a superhero. One superhero. He'll save you if he's not too busy. Your city has a lot of metahumans, and a lot of disasters. The superhero can't be everywhere at once. He's fast, but he's not that fast.

You are afraid of the metahumans all the time, until the first time water dances for you.

You are at school. You've skipped your fifth-grade geometry class because you feel awful and you're out by the fountain hoping the weak morning sunlight will make you feel better. No one's around, so you squat down by the fountain's edge and rest your head and arms on the still-cool stone.

"I wish this would all go away," you say to yourself. You rub your fingers against the stone, hoping the gritty sensation will distract you from your headache. It doesn't, so you lift your head up and sigh.

The sun catches the water and shines in your eyes. You think about animated digital wallpaper you used to have, spheres of water rotating around a sun like planets. A water orrery. You lost it when your computer crashed. You couldn't find it on the internet again.

"If only you could make an orrery for me," you tell the water. You picture it in your head. Nine planets—this was older wallpaper—each following their own path around the sun.

In front of you, droplets of water detach from the fountain's pool, rise to your eye level, and begin orbiting. Sun glints off them. Jupiter's too small, you think, and more droplets rise up to expand it. You spend you-don't-know-how-much time there, making the model perfect, until you hear a door slam and you realize what you're doing and you tell the spheres to go back in the water, _right now._

You're not terrified of the metahumans anymore. They could still hurt you. You still check rooms for exits before you sit down. But you have something you can rely on now. You can tell them _I'm one of you._

And that means you have something else to be afraid of.

You watch the news. More death and destruction. The metahumans all get captured in the end. Or they die. Or they're disappeared. But usually they hurt a lot of people first.

At night, you lock the bathroom door so your parents can't accidentally walk in. You run the bath and make the water dance. You're not trying to test your powers. You don't want to find out if you can do more. All you want is to watch the water move. To lose yourself in it for a few minutes. To spend a little while not feeling afraid.

You start to keep track of where all the water is, so you can stay away from it. You learn the location of fountains, duck ponds, pools. You pay attention to how close to the river or ocean you are. When you can't avoid going somewhere that has a fish tank, you try to stand where you can see the tank. Just in case.

In case something happens. In case you make the water move accidentally. In case you need to run.

People say the Flash is kind and good-hearted, but you have a lot of experience with things like _he's a good kid_ and _I know she didn't mean it_ , and you know that _kind_ is only for some people, and it isn't for people like you.

You already knew there was a gap between yourself and everyone else, but the gap gets bigger now. The gap is made up of _when will I hurt someone_ and _how long do I have until then._ The gap is filled with your future.

You stop by the convenience store on the way home from school one day, to buy a chocolate bar. The people around you are ordinary people, going about their lives. You're waiting in the checkout line when suddenly it's like everyone's too close. You get dizzy, it's like the gap is _right there_ and you might fall into it, and then you do fall and feel your body hit the floor. The next thing that happens is that you're sitting propped up against a wall and a woman your mom's age is asking if you're okay and if you need some water.

You scramble up and run out of the store.

At home that night, you fill the bathtub and bring the spheres up out of it. You can do other shapes too, stars and moebius strips and complicated tangles that turn in the air and change shape—you found this out by accident, you didn't mean to experiment—but tonight you make the orrery again.

By the time the sphere of water that's the earth has made its way around the sun, you've made your decision. You're not going to keep being afraid of the future. You're not going to keep waiting for it. You're going to make it happen.

You don't know where he lives or how to contact him, but eventually you figure out what to do. You make a sign and you put it in your backpack. You put in a bottle of water and a shallow bowl, too. You start listening to the news all the time. You keep an earbud in everywhere you go, and you listen for tragedies in progress.

You walk into burning buildings with the sign hung around your neck. You want to walk into robberies and hostage situations, but you can't quite make yourself do it so you hang around outside being mad at yourself for being too scared to go in. Sometimes bystanders yell at you— _what are you doing, kid, this is dangerous, you shouldn't be here_ —and you run away before you can get in more trouble.

The sign says

FLASH

I NEED TO TALK TO YOU

and eventually it works. You're standing inside a burning apartment building, near an emergency exit because you don't actually want to burn to death if he's too busy to come. You're watching the flame lick the walls when you see the red lightning. Then there's a rush and you're somewhere else. An alley. So you can talk in private, you guess.

You thought he'd be really tall and buff, but he's skinnier than you expected, and not really all that big.

 _Okay,_ he says, standing in front of you. _What's up, kid?_

 _Is everyone at the fire okay?_ you ask. He nods.

 _I need to show you something,_ you say. _It's in my backpack._

He nods again, so you kneel on the ground, unzip your backpack, and take out the bottle of water and the bowl. You stuff your sign back in the backpack because you feel silly wearing it now and anyway you don't need it anymore.

You pour the water in the bowl, and then make the orrery. He kneels down next to it, and reaches out like he's going to touch one of the outer planets, then looks at you.

 _Do we fight now?_ you ask him.

He looks confused. _What?_

 _The metahumans,_ you say. _I see them on the news. They go evil and you fight them. I wanted to do it now. To get it over with. Before I hurt someone._

You don't mean to start crying but once you do you can't stop. Maybe you should have waited until later. Until you were older. Until you could do this without embarrassing yourself. You're pretty sure none of the metahumans on the news cried.

He sits down. You're braced for something to happen—you don't know what, but you know it'll be faster than you can see—but nothing does.

 _Hey, it's okay,_ he says, after a while. _I'm not going to fight you._

You shake your head and try to scrunch yourself into the smallest ball you can.

 _Look, you're like nine,_ he says. _I don't think you're going to hurt anyone._

 _You can't know that,_ you say. Your face is buried in your arms and it comes out a little muffled. _And I'm eleven. I just look young for my age._

 _Yeah,_ he says. _I know the feeling._ There's a pause. _Seriously, though, you're making little sculptures out of water. That's not really the mark of a villain._

You raise one of your arms slightly so you can look between them. The water orrery is still going. The earth moves around the sun at about one revolution a minute.

 _I'll get older,_ you say. _And what if they get bigger and I drown people in them accidentally? Or I go evil and do it on purpose? I can't keep just waiting for it to happen._

 _You know not all metahumans are evil,_ he says. _I'm a metahuman._

You put your arm back down, blocking the orrery from your vision. _But you're a superhero. And metahumans all become evil. I see them on the news all the time. And you beat them up and take them away. Or they die._

He sighs. _The good ones don't make the news. But there are some good ones. Including ones that don't beat anybody up. I guess nobody ever hears about them._ _That's kind of a problem, huh._

You nod into your arms.

 _I have a friend,_ he says. _She's a lifeguard. And a metahuman. She has this power—she can see lots of places at once. But only if they're near her. Kids in her pool are really safe. And then she goes home at night, and she's a good mom to her kids. She's never hit anyone. She's never done anything that would get her on the news._

You crack your arms open a bit again and peer out. He's looking at you from across the orrery.

 _I have another friend, a teacher. Chemistry teacher. He can neutralize acid by touching it. It's been important a couple times, but most of the time it doesn't matter. He's just a teacher. There are metahumans who are like that—they live their lives, and they use their powers for good, or they don't use them. But you don't see them because they're not out there blowing stuff up. They're at their jobs, doing what they do, or at home with their families. They're normal people. Who are also metahumans. Just like you._

 _Can I meet them?_ you ask. You rub your face along your sleeve to dry it.

 _Maybe sometime,_ he says. He gets up to go.

 _Wait,_ you say, before he can vanish. _Will you keep me from hurting anyone?_

He says _I really don't think you're going to hurt anyone._

You say _will you promise me anyway?_

He closes his eyes and says _yes, I promise._ There's a pause. Then he opens them and smiles. _The orrery's great, kid. Keep up the good work._

There's a crackle of lightning and a rush of wind, and you're alone. It makes you feel good that he knows what an orrery is.

After a while, you realize you're smiling at the orrery, and you're maybe a little bit proud. You sit and watch it for a long time before you eventually get up to go home.


End file.
